Lt. Cdr. Joseph Bryan, III (properly, Joseph St. George Bryan, b. April 30, 1904 in Henrico County, VA, † April 3, 1993 in Richmond, VA) came from a family of journalists and wrote a number of books on various historical and military subjects. In the course of his career, he served in the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force, and the CIA as head of its psychological warfare division. A rather full, formal biographical sketch
at Encyclopedia Virginiana
omits one of the more interesting chapters of his life, though: in 1969 he became Acting President of NICAP, a UFO organization which had been prominent in the preceding decades; he was brought in to clean up its financial mismanagement, and is still suspected by some to have been a government mole whose purpose was to discredit NICAP and disband it.

His son C. D. B. Bryan became a well-known journalist and author as well; some of the family's interesting inner history may be found scattered thru several entries in the blog of a grandson,
"Boxes in the Attic".

A preliminary version of the book first appeared serialized in eight installments in the Saturday Evening Post.

The printed book is inscribed,

Tothe officers and men of theUnited States Navy and Naval Reserve,with respect, affection,and gratitude

The printed book includes neither Table of Contents nor Table of Illustrations, nor do the chapters bear titles.

Contents

Illustrations

The printed edition includes 79 photographs: except for the frontispiece, they are gathered in three glossy signatures following page 34, page 130, and page 242. In addition, there are 14 maps, all line drawings.

The page numbers below indicate the placement of the illustrations in these three signatures: 34D, for example, is the 4th photograph (or set of photographs) in the group following p34. In this Web transcription, not being constrained by print limitations, I've moved the illustrations to appropriate locations in the text.

The captions of the photographs given below are for the most part as printed, or close adaptations or abridgments; when altogether my own, they're shown in a different-colored font. Similarly, I've supplied captions for the maps; in the printed book only the first is captioned.

Pagination and Local Links

For citation and indexing purposes, the pagination is shown in the right margin of the text at the page turns (like at the end of this line); p57 these are also local anchors. Sticklers for total accuracy will of course find the anchor at its exact place in the sourcecode.

In addition, I've inserted a number of other local anchors: whatever links might be required to accommodate the authors' own cross-references, as well as a few others for my own purposes. If in turn you have a website and would like to target a link to some specific passage of the text, please let me know: I'll be glad to insert a local anchor there as well.

Proofreading

As almost always, I retyped the text by hand rather than scanning it — not only to minimize errors prior to proofreading, but as an opportunity for me to become intimately familiar with the work, an exercise which I heartily recommend: Qui scribit, bis legit. (Well-meaning attempts to get me to scan text, if successful, would merely turn me into some kind of machine: gambit declined.)

My transcription has been minutely proofread. In the table of contents below, the sections are shown on blue backgrounds, indicating that I believe the text of them to be completely errorfree; a red background would mean that the page had not been proofread. As elsewhere onsite, the header bar at the top of each chapter's webpage will remind you with the same color scheme.

The printed book was remarkably well proofread. The inevitable typographical errors were very few, and almost all trivial: I marked them with a dotted underscore like this: as elsewhere on my site, glide your cursor over the underscored words to read the variant. One correction didn't lend itself to that treatment because it conflicted with HTML: it is marked with a bullet like this.º Similarly, glide your cursor over bullets before measurements: they provide conversions to metric, e.g., •10 miles.

A number of odd spellings, curious turns of phrase, etc. have been marked <!‑‑ sic ‑‑> in the sourcecode, just to confirm that they were checked. They are also few.

Any other mistakes, please drop me a line, of course: especially if you have a copy of the printed book in front of you.

The icon I use to indicate this subsite is essentially a cropped version of the book's front jacket.

Images with borders lead to more information.
The thicker the border, the more information.
(Details here.)